Health challenges campaigns

Whether you support or oppose it, health care reform is treacherous campaign territory.

A series of polls from the Quinnipiac University Polling Center, testing voter opinion on lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the new law, underscore the difficulties of the issue for both Democratic and Republican candidates.

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Twenty-one states, mostly lead by Republican governors and attorney generals, have filed suits challenging in particular the mandate that people buy health insurance or pay a fine.

The Quinnipiac polls, conducted in three states across the past month, all find likely voters to have complex and contradictory views on these repeal lawsuits as well as health care reform itself.

By a slight majority, likely voters tend to oppose the health care reform law. But they also tend to oppose the repeal lawsuits as a “bad idea” that would, for a sizeable portion of voters, make them “less likely” to support a given candidate. In short, voters simultaneously don’t want to health care reform but don’t want to challenge it either.

For candidates, it seems, health care reform is a lose-lose proposition, with little to be gained from a vigorous campaign for or against the law.

“The question is which emotion they feel stronger about, whether they oppose health care more or oppose the lawsuits more,” says Peter Brown, assistant director at the Quinnipiac Polling Institute.

The findings are particularly pertinent in Florida, where the Republican candidate for governor, state attorney general Bill McCollum, has been a leader in repeal movement. McCollum lead a coalition of 12 states in filing health care reform repeal lawsuits the day after the bill passed in the House.

The Quinnipiac poll found that the majority of Florida voters (54 percent) say it’s a "bad idea'' for McCollum to file a lawsuit challenging health care reform; 38 percent say it makes them less likely to support his gubernatorial bid. Among independents the lawsuit is particularly disliked: 41 percent oppose the lawsuit challenge, while 27 percent support it.

Florida voters generally disapprove of health care reform, by about 48 to 44 percent but trying to stop it in court “is probably not going to help McCollum at this point,” says Brown.

While the results are not good for McCollum, they do not give a clear direction to his Democratic opponent, Alex Sink. There’s no easy way to capitalize on the unpopularity of repeal lawsuits, given the widespread opposition to the health reform law. “Put yourself in Sink’s shoes,” says Brown. “She’s behind a little bit. It would be a way to get on TV and in the papers, but it’s always aligning yourself with a law that the majority doesn’t like. So it’s a calculated decision. You have to be very careful here.”

Voter surveys in other states revealed similar patterns, particularly among independent voters. Fifty-five percent of Ohio voters, for example, disapprove of the health care overhaul but only 41 percent think repeal lawsuits are a “good idea.” While the majority of Pennsylvania voters oppose health care reform, they say, 52 to 39 percent, that asking the courts to throw out the health care law is a “bad idea.”

What’s a candidate to do? “You pick your stocks,” says Brown. “One assumes Sink, for example, is doing focus groups to see how to use the issue and whether health care reform is something worth bringing up.”

As POLITICO’s Kenneth P. Vogel reported earlier this week, “The Resurgent Republic poll of 1,000 likely voters found that only 35 percent of respondents agreed with the approach of the GOP members of Congress who sounded the call to ‘repeal and replace’ the health care reform legislation passed in March. Among respondents who identified themselves as Republicans, however, support for a repeal-and-replace strategy was 67 percent, compared to 36 percent among independent respondents. Slightly more popular overall and with independents was an ‘amend and modify’ approach to the overhaul, which 37 percent of respondents supported, including 43 percent of independents.”